Song for a Sunday

It’s hard sometimes to remember that Martin Scorcese, the undisputed elder statesman of American cinema and advocate for cinema more generally, was once a scrappy kid trying to cobble together a feature film.

But he definitely was, and that film was Mean Streets, a slice-of-life portrait of what it means to make it in America, specifically as an Italian-American male, and focused on barely grown-up kids struggling with crime, faith, and responsibility.

“I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV I’m working out ‘most everyday and watching what I eat They tell me that it’s good for me, but I don’t even care I know that it’s crazy I know that it’s nowhere But there is no denying that It’s hip to be square!”

As Huey Lewis sings these wise, profoundly un-hip words over the stereo, Christian Bale’s unhinged, upper-class psychopath Patrick Bateman moonwalks through the room and slaughters a rival with an ax in his tastefully decorated apartment.

Robert Altman strikes again. This will be the last one for a while, I promise.

As in his previous Song for a Sunday entries McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Popeye, Altman’s neo-noir The Long Goodbye leans so heavily on its idiosyncratic score for mood and meaning(s) that it’s hard to imagine the film without it.

Jim Jarmusch’s films are all about textures and surfaces. Down By Law is emblematic.

It sometimes feels like he’s hinting at wellsprings of deeper meaning or emotion, but everything is held at a remove – cold, observing, often ironic. This probably contributes to the love-it-or-hate-it reactions his films seem to inspire, especially the early ones: are they studies in the carefully calibrated hipsterism of people who cloak their authentic selves in the trappings of cool, or particularly egregious examples of it?

One of the Big Deals of the 70s films we’d later refer to as the New Hollywood was their use of contemporary music, as opposed to a scripted score or relying on the classics. These choices could comment on the things happening on the screen, underline them, or invert them: Robert DeNiro’s entrance in Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets to the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” manages to do all three at once.

Yes, three “Song for a Sunday” features and two of them are Robert Altman films. (Wait until we get to Nashville!) The only connecting thread in these is that I like them and think the songs are used well in the movie, and Altman definitely knows how to deploy songs to structure the plot and mood.

It’s rare enough to find a film that believes in revolution, much less one willing to posit a post-revolutionary world. What do we do with one that imagines both, but worries about how oppression will be handled after the rev?

Of all the American directors who came to prominence in the 1970s, Robert Altman is the warmest, the most democratic and the most disarming. The overlapping dialogue, shaggy plots, lived-in sets, and sharp characterization make nearly all of his films feel both like “slices of life” and something much more personal and unique — it’s just that the lives being portrayed are themselves theatrical and all over the place.